Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill.

He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting.

It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy.

And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around.

With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

But is this not what we’ve been trying to do for decades with ethanol, which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot?

As with yesterday’s panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions.

Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean energy industry.

That’s because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry.

There’s a reason petroleum is such a durable fuel. It’s not, as Obama fatuously suggested, because of oil company lobbying but because it is very portable, energy dense and easy to use.

But this doesn’t stop Obama from thinking that he can mandate into being a superior substitute. His argument: Well, if we can put a man on the moon, why not this?

Aside from the irony that this most tiresome of cliches comes from a president who is canceling our program to return to the moon, it is utterly meaningless.

The wars on cancer and on poverty have been similarly sold. They remain unwon. Why? Because we knew how to land on the moon. We had the physics to do it.

Cancer cells, on the other hand, are far more complex than the Newtonian equations that govern a moon landing. Equally daunting are the laws of social interaction — even assuming there are any — that sustain a culture of poverty.

Similarly, we don’t know how to make renewables that match the efficiency of fossil fuels. In the interim, it is Obama and his Democratic allies who, as they dream of such scientific leaps, are unwilling to use existing technologies to reduce our dependence on foreign (i.e., imported) and risky (i.e., deep-water) sources of oil — twin dependencies that Obama decried in Tuesday’s speech.

“Part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean,” said Obama, is “because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.”

Running out of places on land? What about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the less-known National Petroleum Reserve — 23 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope, near the existing pipeline and designated nearly a century ago for petroleum development — that have been shut down by the federal government?

Running out of shallow water sources? How about the Pacific Ocean, a not inconsiderable body of water, and its vast U.S. coastline? That’s been off-limits to new drilling for three decades.

We haven’t run out of safer and more easily accessible sources of oil. We’ve been run off them by environmentalists. They prefer to dream green instead.

Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future “even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet precisely know how we’re going to get there.”

Here’s the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions and put government in control of the energy economy — and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which.

That’s why Tuesday’s speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality.

The Gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations.

That passes for vision, and vision is Obama’s thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.

After 15 days of investigation, India’s Defense Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences concluded its study of 82-year-old yogi Prahlad Jani on Thursday, May 6.

Jani, who claims to have lived without food or water since his childhood, was under the close watch of three video cameras 24 hours a day. Researchers conducted various medical tests on him. The research team, consisting of 35 scientists, could not find any evidence that Jani ate or drank anything during the 15 days.

Doctors have not found any adverse effects in his body from hunger or dehydration. They think that yoga exercises may have caused Jani’s body to undergo a biological transformation. The researchers said tests found that his brain is equivalent to that of a 25-year-old.

In fact, according to the Daily Mail, the doctors said that after fasting for two weeks, Jani was healthier than the average 40-year-old.

When a person fasts, there are usually changes in metabolism, but that was not observed in Jani.

Lord have mercy this lady is hot. Of course, from a practical perspective, her workouts are super intense. You can get a heart attack just reading what she says to do on her site, but man, what a way to go!

A former life insurance salesman has “sold life” to scores of people trying to end it all at Australia’s most notorious suicide spot.

In nearly 50 years Don Ritchie, 84, has saved at least 160 people at The Gap, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour – and he is still on suicide watch.

Lost souls who stood atop the cliff, wondering whether to jump, say their salvation was a soft voice breaking the sound of the wind and the waves, asking: “Why don’t you come and have a cup of tea?”

And when they turned to the stranger, they say his smile made them want to live.

Mr Ritchie, who lives across the street from The Gap, is widely regarded as a guardian angel who has shepherded countless people away from the edge.

What some consider grim, Mr Ritchie considers a gift.

“You can’t just sit there and watch them,” he said, perched on his beloved green leather chair, from which he keeps a watchful eye on the cliff outside.

“You gotta try and save them. It’s pretty simple.”

Since the 1800s, Australians have flocked to The Gap to end their lives, with little more than a 3ft fence separating them from the edge. Local officials say around one person a week commits suicide there and in January, Woollahra Council applied for nearly £1.2 million government funding to build a higher fence and tighten security.

In the meantime, Mr Ritchie keeps up his voluntary watch. The council recently named him and his wife of 58 years, Moya, 2010’s Citizens of the Year.

He has saved 160 people, according to the official tally, but that is only an estimate. Mr Ritchie does not keep count but says he has watched far more walk away from the edge than go over it.

Dianne Gaddin likes to believe Mr Ritchie was at her daughter’s side before she jumped in 2005. Though he cannot remember now, she is comforted by the idea that Tracy felt his warmth in her final moments.

Red Dawn is back, and the left hates it! Spectacular!! I can’t wait for it! (Assuming it’s not some ghastly marketing trick to try and get conservatives into a movie where they try and make a left wing point.)

A movie expected to be a hard-core remake of the original communism-bashing “Red Dawn” of two decades back – where Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze staged a shoot-’em-up against invading Russians in the Colorado mountains – now is being met not with amusement at the entertainment but condemnation because it isn’t “correct.”

The invaders this time are Chinese.

“Later this year, America’s dream factory will foist upon an already blooded-up America a remake of 1984’s ‘Red Dawn.’ It’s probably the most unnecessary, irresponsible, Sinophobic film in America’s history, and that’s saying a lot,” wrote a commentary at The Awl, a New York-based website that boasts of its discussions on “the issues of the day.”

“In it, the Chinese invade and subjugate Americans to pinko commie rule all under the guise of ‘helping’ the nation that has become too irresponsible to take care of itself. It is a paranoia tale of an America where our children no longer get stupid Chinese character tattoos because they want to; they get them because they have to. It’s basically porn for survivalist militia types who believe it is ‘real’ scenarios like that that justify everything from the sale of assault rifles to electing nationalist fear-mongers.”

The original “Red Dawn” focused on freedom’s victory over communism and featured the up-and-comers Swayze and Co. as a resistance group made up of highschoolers fighting back the oppressive Soviet Union. According to Jason Apuzzo at Libertas Film Magazine, the team members “fight the Russkies in the Colorado hills, kick a lot of commie-Spetsnaz ass, and otherwise shout ‘Wolverines!'”

He said he thought the new movie was a gag at first.

“Hollywood doesn’t do this sort of thing. This isn’t the 1980s anymore. Wake up! This is the era of ‘Avatar,’ of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ of Sean Penn hanging with the mullahs in Iran. The communist Chinese aren’t our enemy – they’re our friends! They make our TVs and T-shirts and disposable ink cartridges. Our real enemies are American corporations, environmental polluters, and all those blonde chicks on Fox News,” he wrote.

You bet. Make no mistake, there IS a shadow government. I suspect that a lot of things that happen in this world happen because they want it to. And I have always found it odd that people tend to die in accidents a lot, or commit suicide, or change their minds on issues midstream for seemingly no reason. I know, I know, but the more I see the more it looks that way. As with Rush, I suspect Beck is a number one target of these people. The problem, though, is that he is so well known that without being obvious the only thing they can do to him is try and push him out of the limelight. Whether that will be through threats, intimidation, ‘accidents’, some mention of an undisclosed scandal, or what have you, he is on somebody’s list for sure.

Well I for one applaud Glenn Beck. Glenn, if you pass by this blog, you have an open invitation to dinner 🙂

Combining his incredible talents with the work of his equally incredible research staff, Beck became a household name seemingly overnight. In truth, of course, he had been in media for 30 years, but he had never before had a forum like Fox News.

Beck’s show is so good that I’m convinced if a person doesn’t watch it on a regular basis, it’s almost impossible for him to understand the true causes of the moral and economic collapse of the United States – or even that it is collapsing – because no one else on TV covers most of the stories he dissects in impeccable detail. His modus operandi has been to expose the bad guys through their own words by playing audio and video of them shooting off their mouths and by quoting their writings.

For quite some time now, I have believed that Beck has become so good at exposing the truth, so well-respected and so powerful that the Forces of Darkness in the White House and Congress view him as a major threat to their aspirations to eliminate the Constitution, the rule of law and individual sovereignty in the United States. (In fact, they now refer to him as “the Beck problem.”)

But, as I have written in the past, the Obamafia is in a no-win situation with Beck. If its leaders ignore him, he will continue to disrobe Chairman Obama and his malevolent progressive pals through their own spoken and written words.

On the other hand, as they have already discovered, the more they try to discredit Beck, the more attention they draw to him – and the more people will learn about the details of how they plan to fundamentally transform America. Worse, their childish mudslinging is no match for Beck’s 60 minutes of hard-core truth five days a week (not to mention his three-hour daily radio show).

So Beck keeps raising the ante, and there is no question in my mind that the oligarchy in Washington sees him as a major obstacle between where they are today and their ultimate goal: a firmly entrenched, all-powerful federal government that controls every aspect of people’s lives.

Ever since 9/11, people of good will have been trying to distinguish between true Islam and the “false Islam” of al Qaeda. Few are willing to state the obvious: that this false Islam is ORTHODOX Islam.

The Sixth Commandment (sorry King James) translates from the Hebrew as: “Thou shalt not murder.” There is no clearer murder than Orthodox Islam’s death penalties for blasphemy and apostasy. Murder is any killing that is not in defense against violent attack or conspiracy to violent attack. Blasphemy and apostasy are mere ideological non-conformity, not violent threat. Then there are the Koran’s numerous commands to wage jihad (2.216), to slaughter (9.5), and to subjugate (9.29), all interpreted by orthodox Islam as universal edicts.

Orthodox Islam a murder cult, pure and simple, but orthodox Islam and true Islam are very different things. No contender for “true Islam” can possibly escape the Ten Commandments. Dozens of times the Koran condemns those who “forget the laws of Moses.” This is the founding stone of the religion, the point where the Koran both claims the God of Abraham and condemns the Jews for supposedly being unfaithful to that god. But the Jews were only accused of twisting the “allegorical” parts of the books of Moses, not the “basic parts” (Koran 3.2-7), and nothing is more basic than the Ten Commandments.

Orthodox Islam, with its systematic violation of the Ten Commandments, can only be a grotesquely false Islam, as complete a perversion of true Islam as it is possible to imagine. It is orthodox Islam that attacked America on 9/11, and it is orthodox Islam that must be reviled by every decent person.

My picture of Muhammad? Go ahead you orthodox jihadists, prove the falsity of your Islam by erupting in outrage. Prove that you are “fuel for the fire,” as the Koran names the idolators:

My Ten Cartoonments piece is quite long, but worthwhile if you are interested in the possibilities for using Islamic texts to haul Islam up from a pre-Ten Commandments religion to a Ten Commandments religion, which is all that morality requires of Muslims. Stop committing murder, theft, covetry, adultery, false witness, idolatry, and every other Mosaic crime. Then we are fine. You can come on in, and please feel free to use your new-found freedom to waken your moral sense and start using your god-given brains.

Only by punishing all criticism with death has orthodox Islam been able to keep the lid on its systematic violation of the most fundamental laws of the God of Abraham. The twin death penalties for blasphemy and apostasy are orthodox Islam’s Berlin wall. The west can expose the un-Islamic perversity of this murder, but it is up to Muslims to “tear this wall down,” because THEY are the bricks. They must abandon orthodox Islam for true Abrahmic religion, one by one, or else burn, if there really is a Hell, and there should be a Hell, with special torment set aside for those who do evil in the name of God.

That is what it means to “take the lord’s name in vain.” You didn’t think orthodox Islam would miss violating one of the ten did you?

Read the entire article. It contains a large number of images of Mohammed created by Muslim artists over the centuries. You can find more images and details here. This is my favorite part though:

Perhaps you may also wish to learn more about the discrimination inflicted by Muslims and the religion of peace on non-Muslims living in their midst. Consider what the Muslim response would be to the kidnapping and forced conversion of Muslim children who were then sent back to their countries of origin as occupying soldiers (cf. Janissaries) and other acts of persecution (cf. Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period 1437-1860 [Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2000] and New Martyrs of the Turkish Yoke [Seattle, WA: St. Nectarios Press, 1985].) Consider, too, the fact that Islam was spread primarily by the sword and expanded in a given region due to the systematic discrimination inflicted on non-Muslims under Islamic rule. Self-evidently relevant, too, are the following observations:

The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts [between ‘civilizations’], have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims.

…In all these places, the relations between Muslims and peoples of other civilizations – Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Hindu, Chinese, Buddhist, Jewish – have been generally antagonistic; most of these relations have been violent at some point in the past; many have been violent in the 1990s. Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally arises as to whether this pattern of late-twentieth-century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming.

…Three different compilations of data [provided in the original text – ed.] thus yield the same conclusion: In the early 1990s Muslims were engaged in more intergroup violence than were non-Muslims, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars were between Muslims and non-Muslims. Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.*

* [Huntington’s note:] No single statement in my Foreign Affairs article attracted more critical comment than” “Islam has bloody borders.” I made that judgment on the basis of a casual survey of intercivilizational conflicts. Quantitative evidence from every disinterested source conclusively demonstrates its validity.

– Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp. 255-258.

That’s a long way of saying that what feels like ‘humiliation’ has more to do with the unrealized, politico-religious expectation within Islamic theology that Muslims should, by decree of God, defeat and dominate all non-Muslims than it does with anything the other 4/5 of the world is doing to humiliate Muslims. We are not Satan because your lust for power and domination have not been met; you are being treated far better than your ancestors treated the Christians in their midst, in the main.

It is perfectly obvious that Iran’s latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America’s proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak — no blacklisting of Iran’s central bank, no sanctions against Iran’s oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil — both current members of the Security Council — are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.

But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran’s program.

The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.

That picture — a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam — is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there’s no cost in lining up with America’s enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.

I find this to be profoundly moving. One of those quotes that stirs you..

Often what passes for Orthodoxy or another Christian confession is simply natural religiosity which, in its own right, is a kind of opium of the people. It functions as a sort of spiritual anesthetic, it helps a person adjust to his surrounding world, over which one can hang the slogan: ‘Blessed is the one who believes that it is cozy in the world.’ This is all wrong! …Your God is a consuming fire and not a warm hearth, and he is calling you to a place where all sorts of cold winds are blowing, so that what you imagine does not exist. You adapted and developed a completely different teaching to suit your own human needs. You transformed Christianity into a mediocre, popular religion. …Christianity can be authentic and it can be false. The false form is always more convenient. It always suits us better, which is why contemporary religious life is often characterized by a churchly falsehood when people prefer that which is convenient, calm and pleasant, conforms to their own ideas, consoles them, and which they enjoy. It is not at all to this that the Lord called us when he said ‘the gate is narrow’ and ‘the way is narrow.’ Again and again we need to understand that this Spirit is not warmth, but a fire. It is a fire.

But is it correct, as an objective matter, to call Obama’s agenda “socialist”? That depends on what one means by socialism. The term has so many associations and has been used to describe so many divergent political and economic approaches that the only meaning sure to garner consensus is an assertive statism applied in the larger cause of “equality,” usually through redistributive economic policies that involve a bias toward taking an intrusive and domineering role in the workings of the private sector. One might also apply another yardstick: an ambivalence, even antipathy, for democracy when democracy proves inconvenient.1 With this understanding as a vague guideline, the answer is certainly, Yes, Obama’s agenda is socialist in a broad sense. The Obama administration may not have planned on seizing the means of automobile production or asserting managerial control over Wall Street. But when faced with the choice, it did both. Obama did explicitly plan on imposing a massive restructuring of one-sixth of the U.S. economy through the use of state fiat—and he is beginning to do precisely that.

Obama has, on numerous occasions, placed himself within the progressive intellectual and political tradition going back to Theodore Roosevelt and running through Franklin Roosevelt. With a few exceptions, the progressive political agenda has always been to argue for piecemeal reforms, not instant transformative change—but reforms that always expand the size, scope, and authority of the state. This approach has numerous benefits. For starters, it’s more realistic tactically. By concentrating on the notion of reform rather than revolution, progressives can work to attract both ideologues of the Left and moderates at the same time. This allows moderates to be seduced by their own rhetoric about the virtues of a specific reform as an end in itself. Meanwhile, more sophisticated ideologues understand that they are supporting a camel’s-nose strategy. In an unguarded moment during the health-care debate in 2009, Representative Barney Frank confessed that he saw the “public option,” the supposedly limited program that would have given the federal government a direct role as an insurer in competition with private insurers, as merely a way station to a single-payer system in which the government is the sole provider of health care. In his September 2009 joint-session address to Congress on health care, President Obama insisted that “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.” Six months later, when he got the health-care bill he wanted, he insisted that it was only a critical “first step” to overhauling the system. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was one of the relatively few self-described moderates who both understood the tactic and supported it. “There seems no inherent obstacle,” Schlesinger wrote in 1947, “to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

This prospect haunted the great economist and philosopher of liberty Friedrich von Hayek. There was little prospect, Hayek wrote, of America or the Western democracies deliberately embracing what he called the “hot socialism” of the Soviets. “Yet though hot socialism is probably a thing of the past,” he wrote in the preface of the 1956 edition of his masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom,

some of its conceptions have penetrated far too deeply into the whole structure of current thought to justify complacency. If few people in the Western world now want to remake society from the bottom according to some ideal blueprint, a great many still believe in measures which, though not designed completely to remodel the economy, in their aggregate effect may well unintentionally produce this result.

The non-hot socialism Hayek was describing often goes by the name of “social democracy,” though it is perhaps best understood as an American variant of Fabianism, the late-Victorian British socialist tendency. “There will never come a moment when we can say ‘now Socialism is established,’” explained Sidney Webb, Britain’s leading Fabian, in 1887. The flaw of Fabianism, and the reason it never became a mass movement on the Left, is that the revolutionary appetite will never be sated by its incrementalist approach. The political virtue of Fabianism is that since “socialism” is always around the corner and has never been fully implemented, it can never be held to blame for the failings of the statist policies that have already been enacted. The cure is always more incremental socialism. And the disease is, always and forever, laissez-faire capitalism. That is why George W. Bush’s tenure is routinely described by Democrats as a period of unfettered capitalism and “market fundamentalism,” even as the size and scope of government massively expanded under Bush’s watch while corporate tax rates remained high and Wall Street was more, not less, regulated.

Early in the 20th century, Webb drafted Clause IV of the Labour party constitution in Great Britain, which described its ultimate aim thus:

To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

Clause IV was “holy writ” for British Labourites, to borrow a phrase from Joshua Muravchik’s indispensable history of socialism, Heaven on Earth. Former Prime Minister Harold Wilson compared amending Clause IV to excising the book of Genesis from the Bible. But in the late 1990s, Tony Blair, a leader in Britain’s Christian socialism movement, successfully pushed through a revision to the holy writ. His new version read, in part:

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.

Blair’s revision of Clause IV elicited numerous denunciations. A leader of the miners’ unions said the changes amounted to tearing up the Ten Commandments. Even though he hailed from the Right of the Labour party, Roy Hattersley, a former deputy party leader, complained that Blair was abandoning the “bedrock principle” of “redistribution of power and wealth.” But Blair stuck to his guns. He argued that while he rejected doctrinaire “socialism,” he was committed to what he called “social-ism.”

Blair’s hair-splitting got at an important distinction. Socialism, sprawling and inchoate as it may be, is still a doctrine. “Social-ism” is something different. It is an orientation, a way of thinking about politics and governance—it is oriented toward government control but is not monomaniacally committed to it as the be-all and end-all. Social-ism is about what activists call “social justice,” which is always “progressive” and egalitarian but not invariably statist. As a practical matter, “social-ism” works from the assumption that well-intentioned leaders and planners are both smart enough and morally obliged to, in Obama’s words, “spread the wealth around” for the betterment of the whole society in general and the underprivileged in particular.

But at a far more important level, “social-ism” is a fundamentally religious impulse, a utopian yearning to create a perfect society unconstrained by the natural trade-offs of mortal life. What Blair’s doctrinal revision recognizes is that public ownership of the means of production—the central economic principle of socialism—is not necessary as long as private interests and private businesses can be compelled to follow the designated road to utopia.

Raquel Welch has blamed the Pill for the decline of the institution of marriage.

The Hollywood actress said the widespread use of oral contraceptives had led to a breakdown in sexual morality and fuelled the growth of rampant promiscuity among the young.

Miss Welch, 69, said the situation has grown so grave that ‘these days nobody seems able to keep it in their pants or honour a commitment’.

Sex symbol: Raquel Welch now aged 69, was voted by readers of Playboy magazine as ‘the most desired female of the 1970s’. But she warns that the Pill has created social anarchy

While she argued that it carried some benefits, she said the enduring legacy of the Pill has been social anarchy.

Miss Welch has been a sex symbol since she sprang to international fame for her role in the 1966 film One Million Years BC – and was voted by readers of Playboy magazine as ‘the most desired female of the 1970s’.

But in an article to mark the introduction of the Pill to the U.S. market 50 years ago, she distanced herself from the fruits of the sexual revolution of which she was a part.

‘The growing proliferation of birth control methods has had an awesome effect on both sexes and led to a sea change in moral values,’ she said in an article for television channel CNN entitled ‘It’s SexO’Clock in America’.

A positive consequence of the Pill was it had ‘made it easier for a woman to choose to delay having children until after she established herself in a career’, she said.
woman and contraceptive pill

Miss Welch, who has three failed marriages behind her, added that a ‘significant and enduring’ effect on women was the idea that they could have sex without any consequences – with the result that fewer today saw marriage as a ‘viable option’.

She went on: ‘Seriously, folks, if an ageing sex symbol like me starts waving the red flag of caution over how low moral standards have plummeted, you know it’s gotta be pretty bad.’

A BRITISH Army sniper has set a new sharpshooting distance record by killing two Taliban machinegunners in Afghanistan from more than a mile away.

Craig Harrison, a member of the Household Cavalry, killed the insurgents with consecutive shots — even though they were 3,000ft beyond the most effective range of his rifle.

“The first round hit a machinegunner in the stomach and killed him outright,” said Harrison, a Corporal of Horse. “He went straight down and didn’t move.

“The second insurgent grabbed the weapon and turned as my second shot hit him in the side. He went down, too. They were both dead.”

The shooting — which took place while Harrison’s colleagues came under attack — was at such extreme range that the 8.59mm bullets took almost three seconds to reach their target after leaving the barrel of the rifle at almost three times the speed of sound.

The distance to Harrison’s two targets was measured by a GPS system at 8,120ft, or 1.54 miles. The previous record for a sniper kill is 7,972ft, set by a Canadian soldier who shot dead an Al-Qaeda gunman in March 2002.

In a remarkable tour of duty, Harrison cheated death a few weeks later when a Taliban bullet pierced his helmet but was deflected away from his skull. He later broke both arms when his army vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.

Harrison was sent back to the UK for treatment, but insisted on returning to the front line after making a full recovery.